Asian economic powerhouses are also broadband slowpokes

India and China get a lot of notice for their vanguard roles in outsourcing …

The Akamai State of the Internet report for the third quarter of 2011 is out, and as usual, it is full of interesting data about global broadband developments. Many observers read the survey to get updates on the nations with the fastest broadband speeds and greatest high speed Internet penetration. But what caught our eye this time around was the extent to which two of the world's most important nations, India and China, lag in advanced broadband adoption.

The Akamai report puts particular focus on what it calls "high broadband" penetration—the degree to which the world is embracing speeds greater than 5Mbps. According to the survey, the share of the globe enjoying high broadband grew to 29 percent in the third quarter of 2011. Not surprisingly, South Korea led the pack at 79 percent, followed by The Netherlands (68), Hong Kong (60), Latvia (57), and Japan (57).

The United States came in at number 13 on the scale. 45 percent of the subscribing US populace qualified for the high broadband usage category. But China and India remained "the only two countries with high broadband adoption of 1% or less," Akamai notes, although the company regards recent growth in those regions as a positive sign: "China jumped to 1.0% adoption with a surprising 78% quarterly increase, while India grew a surprising 46% quarter-over-quarter to 0.6% adoption."

It depends on where you start

Akamai gathers all this data via its global network of servers. Jumping to one percent and 0.6 percent adoption rates may represent progress, relatively speaking, but they don't seem like very high penetration rates compared to the rest of the world. They're not even high compared to the rest of the Southeast Asia Pacific zone. As the Akamai chart (below) indicates, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia all significantly outpaced China and India in average broadband speeds during this period. China's was 1.4Mbps and India's was 0.9.

But India still leads the Southeast Asian region in the hyper-pokey narrowband connectivity category. 29 percent of its Internet using populace continued to connect to the Net via a connection slower than 256Kbps. This represented a 13 percent decline from the previous year, but a much higher low-speed Internet usage rate than New Zealand and China (3.3 percent), or the Philippines and Thailand (2.7 percent).

Akamai

Attack traffic and IPv4

Ironically, while India and China remained behind in broadband penetration and speeds, they scored high on Akamai's list of countries from which attack traffic originated. China, India, Egypt, and Taiwan were "all responsible for higher percentages of attack traffic as compared to the prior quarter," Akamai observes. The top eight winning originators in the third quarter were Indonesia (14 percent), Taiwan (11), China (8.6), the United States (7.3), Russia (7.2) Brazil (5.5), South Korea (3.8), and India (3.7).

Meanwhile, China led in second- to third-quarter growth of the adoption of unique IPv4 addresses—a 6.8 percent quarter to quarter change in that country, adding up to a total of 81,661,744 IP addresses. The only other country to come close to that level of growth was the United States, with 1.4 percent change adding up to a total of 145,452,027 unique IPv4 addresses.

China, of course, set a precedent by implementing IPv6 at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. China and India are renowned for their leads in high tech manufacturing and outsourcing, respectively. But the latest Akamai report reminds us that the benefits of those breakthroughs don't necessarily flow to most people in these huge nations. They're still waiting for the broadband revolution to come to their door.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.